


A Belladonnic Haze

by quirkysubject



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Banter, Bodyswap, Crack, Explicit Language, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Hangover, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Light Angst, M/M, Metaphysics, Roommates, Sexual Orientation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29882274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quirkysubject/pseuds/quirkysubject
Summary: It must have been the peppermint schnapps.
Relationships: Freddie Mercury/Roger Taylor
Comments: 20
Kudos: 35





	A Belladonnic Haze

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic idea I had for froger-week initially - but nothing came of it at the time. Seems like it just needed some time to stew in the back of my mind 😊 Most of it is written in draft form, so I'm hoping for weekly updates. 
> 
> Thanks very much to @nastally for beta-reading! 💖

The sun is trying to murder him. 

Roger’s not sure what he’s ever done to it, but there is no other explanation for the piercing, laser-like beams of light it keeps launching directly at his face, making not just his eyes, but his entire head throb with pain. He moans pitifully and rolls onto his side to escape the onslaught, but there is no reprieve. An awful sour taste in his mouth tells him the sun might not be the only thing to blame for his misery. 

He gropes blindly around his night stand, hoping against all hope he might find his sunglasses there. But all his wandering hand encounters is the usual assortment of books, pens, scribbled notes, a glass of water he barely manages not to send crashing to the floor, Vaseline (for the blistered skin on his hands, no matter what Freddie likes to insinuate) and an assortment of hair bobbles. 

Admitting defeat, he gives himself five seconds to summon the strength to sit up. Then immediately wishes he hadn’t as a wave of nausea rolls through him. He breathes slowly in and out through his nose to get through it without throwing up right here in his bed.

It must have been the peppermint schnapps. God, why, _why_ had he let Freddie break out the bottle? That stuff should be illegal. And all they had wanted was a quiet night in, for fuck’s sake.

Every cell in his body is begging him to just lie back down. But up he must, and fast. The schnapps and whatever else they drank needs out. 

He stumbles through his room on unsteady legs, crashing first into his desk, then promptly into the door jamb after he miscalculates his trajectory by a yard or two. His loose pyjama shorts threaten to slip down his hips, so he holds them up with one hand, using the other to stabilize himself against the walls as he totters through the tiny flat like a sailor in a gale. 

When he’s finally made it to the bathroom, he feels like he’s earned to be excused from the flatshare’s sacred ‘sitting down’-rule, so he comes to stand in front of the toilet and shoves his shorts out of the way. He opens his eyes just enough to make sure he hits the loo. 

He blinks unseeing at the dick in his hand while he relieves himself. 

It takes about ten seconds until his brain catches up with his eyes.

* * *

The bone shattering shriek has Freddie jolt out of bed and make a grab for the next best thing to defend himself with. It happens to be a table lamp, and it won’t be of much help, because he remains standing for all of two seconds before he realises he’s still too plastered to be upright and careens right into his armchair. 

“Fuck,” he grunts, voice hoarse from the night before, as he tries to account for all his limbs. The only body part he’s sure is still attached to his body is his head, and only because it is pounding like Brandon Cody in Cocky Boys II. 

He’s just picking himself up from the chair, rubbing at his eyes which for some reason refuse to focus properly, when he hears the sound of heavy footfall in the hallway. For a moment, he fears it might be an intruder, that this is the reason Roger screamed so loudly he didn’t even sound like himself. But before he can do anything about it - not that he has the faintest clue what that might be - the door flies open.

“Freddie, what the actual _fuck_ is - oh god.” The voice falters, and the man too. He hangs on to the door handle, as if his legs are too weak to keep him up, as if everything about him, from his knees to his loose shorts, is a hair’s breadth away from succumbing to the forces of gravity. 

Freddie can’t analyse what he sees any further, his brain taking refuge in the slightly blurry image, frantically telling itself that it must all be a misunderstanding. Because no way would Roger- would _Freddie_ \- That is to say-

“Freddie,” ~~Rog-~~ ~~Fredd-~~ the man stammers, voice trembling. “What the fuck is going on?”

His expression, his tone, it’s all so _Roger_ that it can’t be anyone else. But it’s clearly not Roger. It’s… Freddie shuffles closer, blinking like mad, continually hoping that the next time he opens his eyes, the dark hair will have turned blond, and the eyes blue in instead of brown, and the… oh dear. 

“Roger,” he whispers with the last breath in his lungs. “Can you please pull up your pants?”

He does, with a sort of shell-shocked expression. He reacts to the name, so the man _is_ Roger. Of course he is, these are his clothes, and no one else is supposed to be in the flat, and the way he talks.... Except he looks like… he looks _exactly_ like…

While a horrible realisation sets up camp at the back of his mind, Freddie turns towards the wardrobe and its floor length mirror. 

Shaggy, dark blond hair, blue eyes, pyjama bottoms that fit a bit too snugly. He just about suppresses the urge to check inside his pants too. The figure looking back at him is clearly Roger, although it looks a bit blurry around the edges. Freddie automatically rubs his eyes to get his vision to clear - until he remembers. 

Somehow, impossibly, _preposterously_ , these blue eyes are Roger’s. 

And for some reason, it’s this, more than anything else that drives it home for him. Somehow he, his soul or whatever one would call it, must have travelled into Roger’s body. Or rather, Roger’s body has travelled into his pyjamas, but not the way he wants it to, and swallowed up his soul in the process. 

Oh God. Oh _God!_

Roger is sliding down with his back against the door jamb until he’s sitting on the floor, and lets his head fall back against it with a thud. “Freddie,” he says after a minute, “what the hell was in that schnapps?”

* * *

The tea doesn’t help in the least. If anything, it makes it more apparent that The Situation, as Roger has provisionally started calling it, is real. Really real. _Actually_ real. 

But what else are they supposed to do? They’re hungover, they can’t go out, and they have a problem. Ergo, tea. 

Q.E.D. 

He lifts his cup again and grimaces as the porcelain clinks against the large and unfamiliar teeth that are now in his mouth. 

“Careful,” Freddie chides, and then has the gall to glare at him. It creates an adorable little pout on his face that… 

Roger squeezes his eyes shut and massages his temples with his fingers. What on earth is wrong with him? He hates it when people talk that way about him. Perhaps he should just give in to his impulse and punch the offender - which happens to be himself, or at least some fucked up version of it - in the face for once. It might be cathartic. It might help with The Situation too, who knows. But it would only upset Freddie.

It’s probably just because Freddie is somewhere in there, and his expressions just don’t fit Roger’s face. He keeps trying to hide his teeth with his upper lip, for instance. Which looks plain odd when there’s nothing to hide. (Not that Roger thinks he’s got anything to hide either way. His smile is so radiant when he thinks no one’s looking, and… and that is a completely different kettle of fish he doesn’t have the bandwidth to go into right now.) 

“So.” Roger says finally when the second cup has been drunk and the problem still hasn’t miraculously resolved itself. “What now?”

Freddie just shrugs. He’s got a thousand yard stare and looks absolutely miserable. Roger doesn’t envy him. He knows what his hangovers feel like. 

Roger actually feels better than expected, physically, now that he’s got some tea in him. Either Freddie didn’t drink quite as much last night as he first thought, or his hangovers just don’t get that bad. The lucky bastard. 

“I mean, we both agree that this…” he waves a hand between them to indicate The Situation, “is happening, right? 

“Yeah,” Freddie says, raising his hands helplessly and letting them fall back into his lap.

“I’m not hallucinating this.”

“No,” Freddie replies. “But if you were, you’d be hallucinating me saying this too.” 

Roger’s head starts aching again. “Yeah, right, can we leave the metaphysics out of this for now? Please?” 

Another cup is drunk in silence, both of them trying to look anywhere but at the other, and failing miserably. The changed angle alone makes it so odd - it’s nothing like looking into the mirror at all. Does his nose really curve like that?

They really should talk about it, Roger thinks. But then, what is there to say? They switched bodies, apparently. They don’t know why, and they have no idea what to do about it. They’ve already established this. But they can’t just move on to the weather or their plans for the day either. That would be… bizarre. Not to mention that whatever plans they had, they can’t do anything before they have resolved this, obviously. 

“Perhaps,” Freddie says, his voice wary and hesitant, “perhaps, we could just…” He trails off. 

“What?” 

“Go back to bed. Back to sleep. Perhaps there’s been a… a mix-up during the night?”

“A mix-up,” Roger repeats. “Like… like our souls,” he places air quotes around the word that he has always outright rejected as superstitious rubbish, along with the whole concept of mind-body dualism, but apparently he’s got some rethinking to do, “got up for a wee last night and ended up in the wrong bed?” 

Freddie shrugs, as if that weren’t the weirdest string of words to come out of Roger’s mouth while not under the influence of illegal substances. “We were certainly tanked enough.”

Roger thinks about it. It’s not a bad idea, actually. Not the one about souls wandering about the flat when they’re not looking. That doesn’t make a lick of sense, especially since it seems to have been their bodies that changed places, not the other way round. But going to bed and getting a few more hours of sleep sounds very appealing. And it’s not as if they have any other grand ideas. “Yeah, why not,” he says. 

Perhaps this is just a dream. A shared hallucination, or a kind of social psychosis induced by alcohol poisoning. Pat specialises in neuro, perhaps he should ask her about it once this ridiculous episode is over. 

As he gets up from the barstool - carefully, so he doesn’t keel over - his phone chimes. He picks it up, trying in vain to unlock it with his finger print. Which _of course_ doesn’t work. Another point against the theory of a shared hallucination. He types in the pin and squints at the screen before he remembers he doesn’t have to hold it two inches from his face despite not wearing glasses. 

`(Fiona, 1.36 pm)`  
`At the station`  
`U coming?`🍜😋

The message. 

The name.

The profile pic next to the name. 

The _time stamp_.

“Fuck!” He sprints into his room, narrowly avoiding a black eye from the open door. Then he runs back out to grab his phone and types out a quick “sry b there in 5”. 

“Roger?” 

He ignores Freddie, too busy is he diving into the first pair of jeans he can find, only to find they smell of stale beer and also there’s a huge curry stain on the thigh, so under a steady litany of “fuck bollocks shit fuck” he shucks them again and prays to anyone who might be listening that there’s a clean pair somewhere in his wardrobe. 

He’s halfway through buttoning up his shirt when A Thought penetrates through his wall of manic activism. The thought being that-

“Freddie!” he yells, running back into the kitchen-slash-living room. He slides to a halt in front of his friend, grabbing his t-shirt both to steady himself and to convey his urgency. “There’s something you have to do for me.”


End file.
